Multicultural Ministries

Mission is Central

By Carmelo Mercado

Just prior to His ascension our Lord gave a clear command to His church: Go and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19). The intent of this statement was to place mission as central to the church’s purpose. Jesus did not create a church and then give it mission as just one of its tasks. The very essence of the church is mission. If the church ceases to be missiondriven, it would not fulfill our Lord’s command but instead, at its best, simply become a religiously oriented social organization.

E Carmelo Mercado E Carmen Avila

Mission is central to the identity of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Lake Union Multicultural Ministries Department considers mission as our central purpose; our involvement in a variety of events testifies to our commitment. Here are some examples of what we have done during this past quinquennium.

Latino Youth Outreach and Nurture

The Latino youth event known as Conectate had its origin in 2010 with the purpose of reaching bilingual youth throughout our Union. During this quinquennium, hundreds of our youth came to this unique youth congress, held every other year on the campus of Andrews University, with the purpose of not only helping them to grow in Christ through guest speakers and a variety of seminars but also inspire them to be mission-minded through practical acts of service. In 2016, the theme for Conectate was “Love Live Lead Like Jesus”; in 2018, the theme was “Strength in Numbers”; and in 2021, in our first virtual convocation had as its theme, “Bridge the Gap.”

Lake Union Hispanic Women’s Congress

During this quinquennium, we are thankful for the thousands of women who attended the two congresses that were held (2017 and 2019) on the Andrews University campus. In 2019, we had a unique challenge in that we had so many women register that, instead of meeting at the Howard Performing Arts Center, we held the event in the Johnson Gymnasium. Over 1,000 women came, which included holding a communion service and also the baptism of several women. In 2021, we also had our first Virtual Women’s Convocation; its theme was “Abro mi Corazón al Poder Transformador de Dios” (I Open My Heart to the Transforming Power of God).

Hispanic Evangelism

In October of 2016, we were privileged to support the uniting of Hispanic churches from the Lake Region and Michigan conferences to a citywide campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, held by the Hispanic media ministry, La Voz de Esperanza. We are thankful for the unity fostered from that event and the many baptisms which resulted from that campaign.

Since mission is central to the heart of our department, we were not discouraged by the coronavirus pandemic. We adapted to undertake evangelism in unexpected ways. Our original plans included having the media ministry, Esta Escrito, host evangelistic meetings in Indianapolis. Instead, it was decided to hold those meetings virtually, with our members inviting their friends to watch online and pastors committing to following up on decisions. The Lake Union also partnered with the Hispanic coordinators from the five conferences to hold a week-long virtual evangelistic series in December 2021 with renowned evangelist, Alejandro Bullon, as our featured speaker under the theme, “Mas Alla del Temor” (Beyond Fear).

Refugee Ministry

Refugee ministry is a very important part of the work that this department supports. In 2016, the pastors of the Mizo, Karen and Chin people groups asked if we would support the training of their people in small group and youth ministry. For over two years, members of these people groups came every month to the Lake Union office where they could receive training from Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary professors. We are thankful that over 50 people graduated who received official seminary certificates in those two areas.

Our department also has had the privilege for several years to support Rwandan ministry that the Lansing Bethel Church has been providing for the many Rwandans living in that city. The Lake Union recently has been privileged to support Haitian church plants and a refugee church plant in Indiana.

Collaborative Efforts

In 2016, we were happy to support the translation into Spanish the messages presented by Pioneer Memorial Church senior pastor, Dwight Nelson, in the Hope Trending series. We also partnered with Andrews University on their first Change Day event by providing the opportunity for youth to put together special school backpacks which were sent to children living in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Our department also partnered with the seminary in 2016 with the Mission in an Era of Migrants conference and in 2018 with the Urban Mission conference.

For three years, our department also supported North American Division Hispanic Ministries’ small group initiative known as VIDA GPS by the training of lay leaders and the distribution of materials. Despite the pandemic, this initiative continued in the virtual world by emphasizing small group ministry among our Hispanic youth across our Division.

Unity Amidst Diversity Initiative

In this quinquennium we started a Unity Amidst Diversity initiative by coordinating opportunities for dialogue between state and regional conference pastors and

THE VERY ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH IS MISSION.

laypeople. This initiative was birthed from a meeting titled “Journey for Healing and Understanding,” led by Elder Don Livesay, which took place in Berrien Springs in September 2016.

Following that event, our department took on the challenge to encourage dialogue and partnership between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. We began our monthly meetings with pastors and members in 2017 in Indianapolis which continued for one year, followed by meetings in Milwaukee in 2018 and Detroit in 2019.

As a result of our conversations in Detroit, the area pastors of the Lake Region and Michigan conferences and with the Lake Union led an unprecedented virtual convocation with church members from both conferences, listening to a Bible study on race relations led by Drs. Gregory and Carol Allen titled, “His Invitation: ‘Reconciliation, Unity and Latter Rain Power.”

United Cry Prayer Convocations

The Lord has recently impressed our department to bring together people from all cultures to join an initiative to come into the unity God wants us to have through prayer. In March 2020, the Lake Union sponsored our first multicultural United Cry Convocation which led over 500 people to come together to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Even after the pandemic began, we continued to move forward in prayer by holding two virtual United Cry summits in 2021 with many people from our Union and around the world coming together to pray.

ASI

ASI supports the mission of the Seventhday Adventist Church in spreading the good news of God’s love by sharing Christ in the marketplace. SPECIAL PROJECTS SUPPORT

In 2016, longtime ASI members Dr. Manuel Alva and Dr. Esther Alva opened the ADELANTE Community Health Center in Berwyn, Illinois. Our 2019 offering helped fund a street sign for this center of influence located along historic Route 66.

FARM STEW equips families with skills in sustainable agriculture, plant-based diet, sanitation, enterprise, and more. After joining ASI in 2017, we helped support a trainer on their Jinja Team in Eastern Uganda from 2018 to 2020.

The 2017 Motor City Medical Mission in Detroit served 1,217 individuals—75 percent of whom had no dental insurance, completing 332 extractions and 519 eye exams among other services. We assisted financially and members donated their time and services.

ASI Lake Union made a three-year commitment beginning in 2018 to help support

George and Theresa Tooray, a missionary couple with Adventist Frontier

Missions. They have been ministering to the Muslim Malinke people in Mali, where accepting Jesus may mean losing the support of family and friends.

Orphan’s International Helpline

assists with the basic needs of orphans in Haiti and was a recipient of the 2018 and 2019 offerings.

Each year in this quinquennium, we have supported evangelism to Karen and Zomi refugees within the Lake Union Conference through ASAP Ministries.

In the last six years, we have distributed over $84,000 to 13 projects, led by 12 different ministries that are furthering the advance of the gospel.

MISSIONS

In 2018, we were one of nine Maranatha volunteer groups to work on the construction of an Adventist education center in Dolega, Panama. It will be used both as a school and for evangelism and is the only Christian school in the region. The campus includes ten classrooms, staff offices, bathrooms and a central auditorium that can be used as a meeting space or a gymnasium.

LAKE UNION SPRING FELLOWSHIPS

Each year, our members gather to share ideas, fellowship and learn new ways to evangelize. We have had the pleasure of hosting Maurice Valentine II, Taurus Montgomery and Derek Morris as main presenters. In 2020, our spring fellowship looked a little different as we had a virtual conference broadcasted by 3ABN. In 2021, our chapter held our own virtual convocation with a wide variety of speakers addressing issues of health and faith under the theme, “Faith not Fear.” This virtual broadcast was very popular and even today continues to be viewed on YouTube under the title, “ASI Lake Union Spring Fellowship 2021.”

Conclusion

Jesus' last prayer for His church was a simple one: That they all may be one (John 17:21). The Multicultural Ministries and ASI departments see this prayer as a condition that needs to be met so we can see the Great Commission be fulfilled. It is our desire and prayer that all we have done and will do in the future will lead to the fulfillment of our Lord’s prayer. P

Carmelo Mercado, vice president for Multicultural and ASI ministries; Carmen Rivas, administrative assistant

FAITH Walking by

BY EMILY GIBBS

Dr. Youngjoo Kim was six years old when she personally experienced the existence and the abounding love of God.

Kim had certainly heard faith stories since babyhood. About her paternal grandparents’ early work with the Adventist message in Korea. About her grandmother planting churches everywhere she went. About the contagious faith of her own mother with the household workers who had been hired as non-Christians and retired as believers in Christ.

Now it was her turn.

Kim’s father, a successful businessman in Seoul, South Korea, had just given away his income and his inheritance to become a pastor. Instead of having a maid trailing behind her to clean up her messes, carry out her commands and fulfill her whims, Kim now shared her bedroom, her bathroom and the conference-rented floor of her entire home with church prayer meetings, potlucks and Sabbath school classes. There may have been only twelve other members in that first church—a number that would swell to two hundred fifty over the course of four years, but that didn’t make the invasions multiple times a week any easier.

Kim and her brother struggled to accept the facts that their toys went missing during church socials and they now wore hand-medowns and thrift-store finds instead of tailor-crafted outfits. When Kim began begging her mother for the extravagant clothes and shoes she used to wear, her mother’s response was both simple and serious: “I can’t give them to you, but you can ask God.”

“Can God really do that?” Kim wondered. At her mother’s suggestion, however, she chose the fanciest paper she could find. She wrote

E Dr. Kim graduated Loma Linda University’s dental school and today practices as a pediatric dentist in Ann Arbor, in addition to teaching at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. After undergoing a medical setback, a colleague commented, “You are God’s walking miracle.”

down everything—specifying the colors, patterns and styles her wistful heart desired. She then placed the list in the “church room” of her home, on the podium, in that center spot beneath the microphone. Then the daily ritual was established—tiny shoes were removed to experience the holiness of God’s presence, small knees were bent reverently, dark hair tumbled forward as she bowed, and a little girl’s voice spoke into the stillness of an empty sanctuary.

A few days passed, and then something peculiar began to occur. “Church members started giving me all of those things,” Kim says. The gifts kept coming, nearly once a week, until she had received all the items on her list, exactly as she had written them. “So then I knew there was a God,” Kim says, and adds, “I think God was trying to save me to enter His Kingdom.”

Beyond even the change in financial status, Kim’s experience as a pastor’s kid was a humbling one which forced her to learn self-sacrifice and surrender. There were lots of moves—to Berrien Springs from South Korea when she was nine, to the Potomac Conference for a part of her elementary and secondary experience, back to Berrien Springs for more high school and several years of college, and eventually out to La Sierra University.

And there were long hours. There were many days when Kim’s father picked her up from school on his way to meet with church members. As a bystander on these visits, Kim couldn’t help but witness the miracles that were a direct result of prayer, as her own had been. But what impacted Kim the most was seeing how even powerful, successful people needed God, too.

She remembers the day a church member told her father that life was too hard, and that surely God had abandoned her. Kim’s father responded by sharing the experience found in the famous poem, “Footprints in the Sand,” by Mary Stevenson—that in those toughest moments, in those low, sad and troublesome times when only one set of footprints is visible in the sand, Christ is carrying His beloved children. “It really touched me,” Kim says.

This moment proved to be yet another anchor point in Kim’s experience, one that sustained her—as she attended Loma Linda University and graduated with a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree in 2004, as she completed a general practitioner residency in Bronx, New York, and a second, pediatric dentistry residency at New York University in 2007. She clung to these foundational moments as she worked in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, as she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2010 to join the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, and later as she began her work with Tree Town Pediatric Dentistry in 2015.

The God of Kim’s grandparents and parents was, and would be forever, her God.

TEST OF FAITH

Kim’s own lowest, saddest and most troublesome time began on Mothers’ Day 2017 when she collapsed shortly after returning home from seeing an emergency patient. After her oldest son found her and called 911, she was taken to Michigan Medicine where an angiogram confirmed the diagnosis of a stage IV

“I BELIEVE IN YOUR GOD.”

subarachnoid hemorrhage. The prognosis was not favorable. Her only hope was surgery; even so, there would be no guarantee for her future quality of life, her ability to speak, or the possibility of her ever returning to dentistry. The surgery also would require her to spend a minimum of three months in the ICU as she recovered.

The surgery was not left in the hands of chance, and not even in the hands of science. It was left in the hands of God. Kim’s mother and father, along with close friends Pastor and Mrs. Sung Sun Hong, began their vigil at 6:30 the next morning and spent nine long hours in the public waiting room, fasting and praying aloud, until the surgeon informed them the surgery was over, he had done his best, and that Kim was now in the ICU.

Halfway into Kim’s third week in the ICU, however, her recovery was so unprecedented that she was transferred to a step-down unit. Several days later, she was sent home—nearly two-and-a-half months ahead of schedule. “My memory was perfect, right after the surgery,” Kim says. “I was just fatigued and had to rebuild my stamina.”

When Kim returned to her surgeon’s office for her first follow-up appointment a week later, she brought a two-minute video clip of her playing Wyman’s “Silvery Waves” on the piano the day before. “You won’t be needing any physical therapy,” her surgeon responded after watching the recording, and added a few moments later, “Can I mention your case at a conference?” He promised that he would blur out her face in the video and keep her name anonymous.

But anonymity has not otherwise been a part of Kim’s story. She encounters people who recognize her everywhere—at events in the Ann Arbor and University of Michigan communities, and while checking out her groceries at Costco. And the same phrases come out of the mouths of her fellow clinicians, of the doctors at University of Michigan, of her evolutionist internist, of her non-Christian surgeon, of the believing and non-believing parents of her pediatric patients: “If I did not see you, I would not believe this. You are God’s walking miracle.”

One of Kim’s colleagues in particular, a non-practicing Catholic who has now, through the power of the Holy Spirit, committed both to Bible studies and financially supporting the Ann Arbor Korean Seventhday Adventist Company, told her, simply, “I believe in your God.”

Who is Dr. Youngjoo Kim’s God—our God? He’s a God who impresses our parents to sacrifice status and situational comfort for their faith. He’s a God who answers our childhood prayers. He’s a God who allows life-threatening illness so that He can demonstrate His great power in both saving us and carrying us through those trials. He’s a God who can do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us (Eph. 3:20). And He’s a God who works miracles so that we can walk, like Dr. Youngjoo Kim, in newness of life (Rom. 6:4). P

Emily Gibbs has taught in the Michigan Conference for the past 10 years—in both peninsulas, and in both elementary and secondary classrooms. Emily currently juggles several roles: Great Lakes Adventist Academy Religion IV teacher, mom to a toddler and pastor’s wife. When she’s not in the classroom, you can find her gardening, writing or adventuring outdoors with her husband, daughter and dogs.